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When in Italy??

R

rswiv

Lurker
We leave for Florence Italy for 2 weeks. We should have a working cell phone with us, and I'd like to have a GPS-something I can use to navigate on a bicycle (and car).

I believe my Droid I will not work, even if unlocked and supplied with a European SIM card. Right?

Verizon will give us a phone, but it costs $1.29 per minute and something like $20 per MB of Internet access. They say it has some navigation capabilities, but not Google maps.

I can rent a Eurpoean-ready phone with much cheaper talk minutes for not too much money, but it won't have GPS and map capabilities.

I can't find anyone that rents Droids or such.

I could buy a portable GPS navigation system in the US that could be loaded with Italy maps, but once the trip was over it would duplicate capabilities of the Droid.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome!
 
I wonder if your phone came with MotoNav, if it did, your phone could just be used as a GPS and read the preisntalled maps on your phone. Usually with MotoNav, you turn on GPS, turn off wifi, and you are good to go, since the phone would be accessing the internal GPS and not using the Verizon network to gain your location
 
No, this Droid I doesn't seem to have MotoNav in its applications and I can't seem to find it listed in the Droid Market. Nerts. That would have worked. There seem to be other off-line navigation apps that work with previously downloaded maps.. ??
 
Thank you JEcht. Its a Droid-without-a-number that came out before the Droid 2, so I call it a Droid-I.

I haven't tried preloading maps (or directions) from a home base and then seeing whether the maps and instructions will work with the Droid in airplane model. I will do that here in the US (tomorrow hopefully), but fret that I'll do something in Italy that will erase the maps and instructions when I'm 20 miles out, down wind, and 2000 ft lower than base camp.

There seem to be apps that are explicitly designed to use downloaded maps. Do you have any experience with either retained Google maps or the apps that use downloaded maps?
 
In airplane mode, my Droid-I does keep track of my location and provides voice directions that were set up before the airplane mode was turned on.

I pre-programmed the outbound leg of a lunch trip and then put the Droid in airplane model. The maps and spoken directions worked flawlessly.

Then I tried to navigate back looking at Google maps. The Droid kept perfect track of my location, but the maps went to lower and lower resolution as I moved away from the luncheon spot.
 
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